Bad Dog!: A Memoir of Love, Beauty, and Redemption in Dark Places

Bad Dog!

1.

Iam eight years old, my brother, Rowland, ten. We follow Father up the steep wooden stairs to the second story bedroom. He doesn’t say anything. Our steps echo in the hollow of the stairway enclosure. Father holds the lath stick by its end. It’s stiff and splintery and it hangs from Father’s hand almost to the floor. I swallow the words that would beg Father, once more, not to do this.

In the upstairs bedroom, Father shuts the door behind us. A ceiling light hangs from a cord. It shines on the bed, leaving the corners of the room in shadows. Father stands by the bed. He looks at us. Rowland and I stand backed up against the closed door. We don’t move. Outside in the hall, Laddie, our farm dog, scratches at the door. Father looks sad and serious like he wishes he didn’t have to do this. He points toward us with the lath stick, and I hear him ask, Which of you goes first?

Rowland goes to the bed. He wants to get it over with. It’s worse to go last, but I can never make myself go first. Rowland unbuttons his jeans and pulls them down to his knees. He does this without being told. He knows he has to pull his jeans and underwear down and lie face down on the bed. He pulls his underwear down at the very last because he doesn’t like to show himself. He waits for the first blow. I look away. My body shivers and I feel cold. I hear Laddie snuffling at the door, and then I hear the crack of the lath stick. Rowland doesn’t cry. He holds his breath. He has told me that this is the way to do it.

I hear the lath again and then again. Still Rowland doesn’t cry. Laddie whines at the door. I don’t know why Father is whipping us. Rowland teased me and punched me behind the barn, and I called him bad names. Did Mother hear us? I had some bad thoughts. Did Mother know them? Mother was angry and then she was sick and lay on her bed and put a wet cloth over her eyes and told us that we would be whipped when Father got home. I got scared and tried to talk to her and make it okay again, but the cloth was over her eyes and she wouldn’t talk to me.

Rowland’s turn is over and he gets off the bed. I pull my shirt up and tuck the end of it under my chin to keep it from falling. I pull my pants and underwear down. My penis feels rubbery where I try to hide it under my hands, and Rowland watches me. I hold my breath. The first blow comes. It hurts more than I can stand. My hands stretch back to cover my bottom and I hear myself whimper, Please, Father, please. If you do that, you’ll only make it worse, Father warns. Sometimes Father says it hurts him more than Rowland and me. I don’t believe him. He doesn’t say it tonight.

When it’s over, Father goes out. Rowland is in the dark near the wall. I’m under the ceiling light. Rowland can see me wiping at my runny nose with my shirt, but he looks away. We have something wrong with us. We both have it. We do not like to look at one another. It makes us too sorry.

After a while I go out. Laddie is waiting. He’s glad to see me and wags his tail and rubs himself against me. Go away, Laddie, I say. Later, in the dark when I can’t sleep, I slip from my bed and open the door onto the hall where Laddie waits. Clutching him to me, I tell him how sorry I am.

2.

I am eleven years old. Laddie has done something bad and Father has seen him do it and I don’t know what is going to happen. Rowland says that Laddie killed a turkey. When Mr. Post’s dog, Starkey, began killing our turkeys, Father told him about it. And when the dog didn’t quit Father shot it. I saw him do it. Starkey was dragging a turkey from the roost when Father shot him. Starkey whined and went round and round in circles until he fell down. Blood was coming out of his nose and pretty soon he died.

In the barn, Father has a rope around Laddie’s neck. When Laddie tries to pull away, Father jerks the rope. It chokes Laddie and makes him cough. Laddie’s fur is tangled and dirty like he’s been rolling on the ground. A dead turkey lies on the floor. It’s torn and bloody and its feathers are wet. Oh Laddie, I cry out, what have you done? I squat and put out my hand. Laddie wags his tail and comes toward me.

Father jerks him away with the rope. Don’t be good to him, Linley, Father says. Now that he’s tasted blood, it’s not likely he’ll quit.

He doesn’t know, Father. I am trying not to cry, but I can feel my face screw up and my voice goes high.

Father hands me the rope tied to Laddie’s neck. If he kills again, Linley, we can’t keep him. If you want your dog, do now exactly as I say. I know what to do without Father telling me because Mr. Post tried this with Starkey, but it didn’t work. It’s what everybody does with a dog that starts killing. If we can’t make Laddie stop, we can’t keep him. But we can’t give him away either. Nobody will take a dog that kills.

I tie Laddie by the rope to a post in the barn, and gather the bailing wire and wire cutters and roofing tar that Father told me to get. The dead turkey is covered with flies. Tiny yellow eggs are already stuck to the places where the blood has dried. I take a stick and dab tar on the turkey until its feathers are all plastered down and the torn places are filled and its eyes are stuck shut. This way, Laddie won’t chew it off. I punch the baling wire through its body and wrap one end around each of its legs so that I can tie them around Laddie’s neck. Father says the turkey has to stay there until it rots off because we have only one chance. I’m not supposed to be good to Laddie. He has to learn not to kill.

I take the rope off Laddie. He’s glad to have the rope off and wags his tail and tries to lick my face. Bad dog! I tell him, bad dog! The turkey hangs from his neck and the tar sticks to his fur. Bad dog! I say again.

After three days Mother won’t let Laddie near the house anymore. We are told to keep the yard gates shut. It’s intolerable, she tells Father. I can smell him even here in the house.

I watch father. He doesn’t look up and he doesn’t say anything.

It’s not just the smell, you know, she says. I can’t bear the thought of it.

That doesn’t help any, is all Father says.

At the end of a week, Laddie quits coming for the food I carry out to him. I find him where he has crawled back into a space under the floor of the storage shed. I call to him but he won’t come. I push the food under to him. I bring a basin of water and push it under too. I do this for two more weeks. Sometimes a little of the food is gone and some water but most of the time he doesn’t eat anything.

Once during this time I see from a distance that Laddie has come out from under the shed. The turkey sags from his neck and drags on the ground when he walks. Even from far away I can see that the turkey is slimy and bloated. Laddie! I call. I run to him but, before I can get there, he crawls back under the storage shed. I see him there in the dark. I try to crawl under the shed but it’s too tight and I can’t get to him.

And then one day he’s out. I find him in the barnyard, the baling wire still wound around his neck where the turkey has rotted off. I remove the wire, but he doesn’t wag his tail or try to lick me. I take him to the washroom and fill the washtub with warm water. I lift him into the tub and wash him with soap. I scrub him and rinse him and draw more water and wash him again. I dry him with a towel, and brush him, and I keep telling him that it’s okay now, that it’s all over. I let him out on the lawn by the house where the sun shines through the elm tree, and then I go back to clean up the washroom.

When I come for him, he is gone. I find him under the storage shed. It’s months before he will follow me out to the turkey yards. He never kills again.

3.

I am sixty years old. Father is ninety-three and he is in the hospital with pneumonia. It is not at all certain that he will survive this illness. Rowland and I take turns watching him through the night. Now it is nearly two in the morning and Rowland has gone to rest. Father is fitful. He suffers from diarrhea, and it wakens him frequently in such a state of urgency that I don’t dare doze off myself. Father refuses to use a bedpan, and he is too weak to reach the toilet by himself. He needs me to get him there.

I watch him on the hospital bed where he labors in his sleep to breathe, his thin chest struggling with effort. Father is much softened with age and with grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose innocent loves have reached him beyond his fears. They have coaxed him out of his darkness.

A quarter past three. Father calls. Linley, I need to go. He tries to sit up and get his feet to the floor even before I can reach him. I help him up. He has so little strength, yet he uses every bit he has to get himself to the bathroom. I support him as we walk around the foot of the bed and through the bathroom door before I realize we are too late. His hospital gown is pulled open in the back and feces runs down his legs and onto the linoleum where he tracks it with his bare feet.

He looks at me with the most urgent appeal. He is humiliated by what he has done, and his eyes ask of me that it might never have happened. He would cry with the shame of it had he not forgotten how to do so. I back him up to the toilet and sit him down. A fluorescent ceiling light glares down on us. In the hallway beyond these walls I can hear the voices of the night nurses on their rounds. I shut the bathroom door, and when the latch clicks shut on the two of us the sound of it sends a shiver through me. Once again I wait for the crack of the lath. For a moment this old man, sitting soiled in his own filth, disgusts me. But in the cloistered silence of the room, his helplessness cries out to me and the sight of him blurs beyond sudden tears. Laddie whines somewhere in the dark. And from that darkness there rises in me an unutterable tenderness.

It’s okay, Father, I tell him. It’s okay. I find clean towels and a washcloth and soap. I run water in the basin until it is warm. I take off his soiled hospital gown and mop the floor under his feet with it and discard it in a plastic bag I find beneath the sink. I wash Father with soap and warm water. I wash him carefully, removing all the feces from around his anus and in the hair on his testicles and down the inside of his legs and between his toes. I wash him until all the rotten things are washed away.

The Duck Pen

My baby sister, Evelyn , six years younger than me, wasn’t much more than a year old when Mother took to setting her out on a little patch of shaded grass under a tree in the backyard and putting me to watching over her. I loved my little sister so this was fine with me. At the time, Father was raising a few ducks along with his turkey operation, and it so happened that the duck pen was right there in the back yard as well. Evelyn always wanted to get into the duck pen, especially when there were newly hatched ducklings running about, downy little puffs with tiny sticks of legs and two dark spots for eyes looking at you from over the ridge of a flattened little pink bill.

Mother would no sooner have set Evelyn down and gone back into the house than Evelyn would be tugging at the fencing of the duck pen, trying to get in. She wasn’t big enough to manage the gate, but I could and so I’d open it for her and let her in with the ducks. She’d plunk down on the mud and manure and let the little ducklings peck at her. Sometimes I’d help things out by tossing a handful of grain from the feeder bin in her direction, and the ducklings, little more than miniature eating machines at that age, would walk all over her to get at the feed. I’d been a duck pen–sitter myself once, so I understood exactly why she liked baby ducks on her lap.

The principle of duck pen–sitting is one of simple delight. It’s entirely uncalculated, an innocent inclination to like what the moment offers, a kind of freshness that can surprise you in stale places. After all, we’re each sitting in some sort of duck shit—yet the whole world is brightened with little peeps and peckings and downy little discoveries of a sort we’d probably never think to ask for. And it’s not just that sitting in duck shit is tolerable because the ducklings are so cute, it’s that duck shit is pretty amazing stuff in its own right.

Duck pen–sitting is a state of mind that you can’t initiate by an exercise of will. It’s rather something called up in you, often at times when you least expect it, a grace given without the asking. It’s not something you happen to deserve. It comes unbidden and is virtually unavoidable regardless of your merit or lack. It can come upon you like a blaze of yellow daffodils breaking through rotting leaves on a dark February morning, or the noisy sucking of a nursing newborn calf, a girl tossing her hair forward over her head to dry in the sun, the call of sandhill cranes passing overhead in the midnight sky.

Once you’ve sat among the ducks in this way, you never forget what it’s like. It will sustain you, redeeming the sourest of circumstances—like suddenly remembering in the throes of a divorce settlement how much you love your adversary, or like the unexpected and perfect beauty seen in a lover’s anger, or like that precious instant of recognition in the eyes of a loved one whose mind has been taken from him by age or disease. There’s a power of surprise and delight adrift in the universe that can settle on the most unlikely and difficult situation, transforming it in ways you’d never suspect.

Like all farm families, the Jensen family cultivated a large garden, particularly during the years of World War II when food was scarce. We didn’t have the cash to buy much of what we ate and without the garden we would have gone hungry. Mother always put up vegetables for the off season, stacking the pantry shelves with hundreds of Kerr mason jars, each labeled according to its content. One of the things she always canned was stewed tomatoes. When they appeared on the table, I only had to look at them to know that I didn’t like them. The plump little tomato halves looked so slimy floating in their own juices that I knew I’d throw up if I tried to swallow one of them.

You need to know that the refusal of good food was not readily tolerated at the Jensen table. We children were expected to eat what was given us and not waste anything. Whenever stewed tomatoes were included, I’d load my plate with carrots, beets, spinach, string beans, anything but tomatoes in an effort to show my good will and gratitude. In this way I had somehow managed to get by for years without ever tasting a single bite of stewed tomato. And yet whenever the tomatoes came out of the pantry, there was a certain tension in the air regarding my refusal of them. Once or twice Mother had spooned some tomatoes onto my plate, and when it was remarked that I hadn’t eaten them I’d plead my case with such an urgency that I’d be let off without a showdown. Still, no one likes to hear an ungrateful boy say that the food on his plate makes him want to gag, and the evening came when I’d run out of time. Father himself grabbed the serving bowl and spooned not one but two tomato halves onto my plate and told me to quit my foolishness and eat what I was given. I knew I was up against it and that I’d have to eat the dreaded things, but I was absolutely sure I’d vomit if I did. I simply couldn’t bring myself to put the stuff in my mouth. But Father had no such misgivings and he came around the table and grabbed me by the neck and proceeded to stuff stewed tomatoes down my throat. I struggled, trying to keep my lips sealed against the invasion, but Father was having none of it and he forced the spoon between my clenched teeth and shoved stewed tomato into my mouth.

I didn’t vomit. I didn’t even gag. I liked them! I sat there with tears of defiance streaming down my face, and was startled to realize that the tomatoes tasted good. This is the sort of sneak attack that delight seems to specialize in. I’d been ambushed by a pleasure I couldn’t anticipate or defend myself against. Father was looking as close to apologetic as he was ever likely to get, but I was already moving beyond the outrage of his treatment of me to the undeniable fact that I was about to ask for a second helping of stewed tomatoes.

I think you see now that the gate to the duck pen can open for you at any time. A Zen acquaintance of mine, who for years had been a member of the zendo where I teach, once came to a teacher/student interview for the express purpose of telling me what she really thought of me: I think you’re a phony, she said, and only pretending to be a Zen teacher. I would expect myself to be scrambling to put up the barricades, especially with this coming from someone I would never have guessed felt that way. Even now I can imagine all sorts of defenses I might have offered on behalf of my teaching competence. But at the time I wasn’t doing any of those things. Instead I was checking the situation out. And when I finally spoke, I had to say, You know, I think that myself sometimes. My accuser would never know that in some unaccountable way she’d opened a gate onto the past, and with a whole brood of ducklings suddenly tracking mud all over the interview room I was able to find some agreement with her characterization. To this day, I don’t know any response of mine to a criticism that’s given me more pleasure than that unguarded admittance.

The old Chinese Zen masters were wary of categorical thinking and of the way it serves to control our response to the world. A world order viewed in this analytical way is merely an order of one’s own devising. The trouble with categorical thinking is that it leads you to believe that you’re seeing what you’ve seen before. But sometimes the sheer wonder of the moment breaks through these classifications of ours. The names of things vanish and, though the daily arrival of the sun is an accustomed fact, we are astounded to see a great glowing ball of light rise from the eastern horizon.

The old Zen master Lingyun must have felt this way when, on his walk, he rounded a mountain and saw peach blossoms on the other side of the ravine. Nothing would be more common than peach blossoms in the Chinese spring countryside where Lingyun walked. He would have known at a glance that they were peach blossoms, but at that moment he saw them for the first time and was awakened to a world no name can capture and where nothing ever happens twice. Another old master was sweeping the walkway when the motion of his broom threw a pebble against a bamboo stalk. Tock! For the instant, there was nothing in the universe but that singular sound. A Zen poet once sang, How wondrously strange and how miraculous this! I draw water, I carry wood. In other words: I’m alive!

Zen master Yunmen was brought to life in this way when his teacher slammed the door on his leg and broke the bone in two. Elder Ting, surprised by a sudden slap in the face, stood motionless for a moment, not knowing what to do. When a monk standing by said, Elder Ting, why do you not bow? Ting bowed and suddenly the whole world opened up and took him in. The delight of simply being alive doesn’t depend on whether something is pleasant. It can come with the sudden brilliance of peach blossoms or a slap in the face.

It no longer surprises me that some sort of simple joy will shine out from places where you’d not expect to find it. It appears in its own unlikely time, like chancing upon a faded snapshot of your own face grinning back at you from under a stack of old bank statements in a desk drawer.

The inclination toward delight is redemptive, awakening a wonder in us that doesn’t worry itself about the mud and manure of circumstances. Duck pen–sitting is a perfect model for its workings. When Mother would find Evelyn in the duck pen, she would grab her up out of there as though she had no understanding of what was going on at all. Yet she must have known that Evelyn was there all along, since the kitchen window where Mother was often working looked right out on the back yard. But she had her duty as a mother and she would say, Oh Linley! I told you to watch over your sister. Can’t I trust you to do anything I ask? But of course I was watching over my sister, and it seems a curious omission that for all the times she had to clean Evelyn up and launder her soiled clothes Mother never punished me or specifically ordered me to keep Evelyn out of the duck pen.

The Killing Shed

Ihuddle by the tub of scalding water. Steam rises from its surface and a little warmth can be gotten from the gas jet underneath. Through the open door at the rear of the shed, I can see into the holding pen where forty or fifty turkeys stand jammed together in the rain. Their wings, heavy with rainwater, drag in the mud as they mill about and push themselves against the fence looking for a way out. In the shed, seven of them hang dying in a row suspended from the ceiling by cords cinched to their legs. Their feathers are smeared with mud and manure and their necks are stretched toward the floor by lead weights hooked into their nostrils. Their bodies alternately relax and contract in sudden spasms. Blood drains from their bills into buckets beneath them.

I wear heavy yellow rain gear and rubber boots, splattered now with blood. In my hand, I hold a boning knife. It too is sticky with blood. Where some of the blood has soaked into a cuff beneath my rain jacket, I can feel a little of its residual warmth. The turkeys now hang dead, the last of their convulsions over, their necks limp, their